Fostering Reasonableness: Supportive Environments for Bringing Out Our Best

Abstract

 
Landscape architects are often leaders in creating vital open community spaces. Early pioneers in the profession such as Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., Jens Jensen, and others sought to create public parks and gardens that would serve important social goals in providing healthful green spaces for people to use to relax and for recreation (Beveridge, 1977; Beveridge & Schuyler, 1983; Grese, 1992; Taylor, 2009). The strengths of their designs came from years of observing how the public used outdoor spaces and from their vision for creating new democratic gathering spaces for public discourse, outdoor performance, or connecting with nature. As early leaders in an evolving profession of landscape architecture, they and their contemporaries developed an expert-based model whereby designers saw themselves as providing a work of art for their clients. New York City’s Central and Prospect Parks, created by Olmsted in collaboration with Calvert Vaux, are good examples of such parks treasured today as important community spaces of urban nature.

While Jensen’s work largely followed this expert-based model, the implementation of his last major public landscape design, the Lincoln Memorial Garden, begun in 1936, required engaging many volunteers. As a project by the Springfield Garden Club and the Garden Club of Illinois, the intent was to create a living memorial to Abraham Lincoln representing the native plant communities from places where Lincoln had lived during his childhood and adult life, namely southern Indiana and central Illinois. Starting with old agricultural fields on the shores of the newly created Lake Springfield, Harriet Knudsen and the other leaders of the Springfield Garden Club engaged schoolchildren from across the region to collect acorns and worked with garden club chapters across the state of Illinois to rescue wild plants for planting in the garden spaces. The broad engagement of community members led to a heightened sense of ownership of the Lincoln Memorial Garden that has been critical to its long-term success. It is not surprising that the Lincoln Memorial Garden remains one of the best-maintained public landscapes created by Jensen during his entire career (Grese, 1992).

One of the chief problems with the “designer as expert”[1] approach is that the resultant landscapes may or may not be embraced by the public that uses them regardless of how visionary they might be as physical designs. What made the Lincoln Memorial Garden markedly different was the engagement of a broad cross section of community members in the process of implementing the design. Among the key lessons in these historical examples is that listening to people and engaging them in the creation and care of landscapes can result in their being more readily embraced by the people who ultimately use them and can ensure that the places actually endure. For a designer wanting to leave a legacy, this can be a critical motivation.

Often, however, approaches for engaging the public in the design process are overlooked in the training of landscape architects. This may be due to the relatively short time frame of academic design studio projects, lack of clarity of who constitutes the stakeholders for certain projects, or a general feeling that engaging input from nondesigners might reduce the vibrancy of design concepts explored by students.[2] The danger, however, is that design professionals leave their academic training with the perception that engaging people is not integral to their own role as designers. This can result in public spaces designed with little regard for the people who ultimately use them or frustration by both designer and community members late in the design process when designs become mired in controversy.[3] In this chapter, I reflect on personal experience in attempting to integrate community engagement in design teaching early in the careers of landscape architecture students at the University of Michigan in the context of the Reasonable Person Model (RPM) framework.

Valuing Participation in the Design Process

The degree to which we value participation in the design process raises several key questions. Is landscape architecture more of a fine art expressing the views and values of the artist, or is it more about practical problem solving focused on expressing community values? In “Creative Risk Taking,” Stephen Krog (1983) raises the question of “whether the profession’s works are to be a service to society or a commentary on society.” While many landscape architects and site planners likely see their role more as service rather than commentary, they also aspire to use artistic skills to create places where users discover new things about themselves and their relationship to others or to nature.

A second key question relates to how and when users and stakeholders are involved in the process. Following an expert model, many designers argue that their years of experience in creating public places and observing their use substitutes for the need to get input on specific projects. They feel that they can anticipate people’s needs and reactions and that the process of public surveys, focus groups, or meetings would complicate the process and make it more costly. For these designers, making public presentations of their design ideas near the end of the process is perfectly adequate.

Others would support engaging people early and at key benchmarks throughout the process of design. Randy Hester has long argued for a design process that engages members of the community and seeks their input throughout the process (1984, 1985, 1990, 1999). He cites numerous examples where designers have worked with local communities to better understand their resources and values to create designs uniquely suited to the social and environmental ecologies of a place (Hester, 1990). From his experiments over the years in engaging the public, he has suggested twelve steps in a Community Development by Design process, distinguishing each step as contributing to a designer’s knowing and understanding of a place or about “place caring,” that is, engaging people in the act of designing and/or choosing design alternatives (Table 19.1).

There is much coherence between Hester’s model and RPM as developed by Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989, 1998, 2003, 2009). RPM provides a useful framework for explaining the value of engaging the public in design decisions. As suggested by the Kaplans, people can be reasonable, like to know, want to learn new things, and hate being confused or feeling helpless. Moreover, they want to feel that they have opportunities to have input into the environments that shape their lives. RPM is composed of three main domains of informational needs: model building, meaningful action, and being effective. The model-building domain refers to the mental models that people create to help them cope with reality and understand and function in the world around them. In considering changes to the environments where people live and play, they want to know and understand those proposals and how changes might affect their lives. Designers can use their visual representation abilities as experts to help people envision the possibilities for local environments and offer their own feedback and expertise. In Hester’s model, this includes elements of each of Steps 1–8.

In terms of meaningful action, people want to know that their voices will be heard, their actions will contribute to decisions, and they will be treated with respect. In Hester’s model, each of the first three steps is part of enabling meaningful ways for people to share information. An effective engagement design strategy accomplishes all of these through techniques such as public surveys, workshops, and community meetings. Sharing inventory and analysis information back with the community (Hester’s Steps 4–6) provide checkpoints to ensure that designers heard information correctly.

Finally, being effective relates to how people handle levels of information to be able to process that information and make effective decisions. In terms of a designer trying to gain public input, it becomes essential that information be shared in clear and understandable ways and not be overwhelming. More information is not necessarily helpful. What is essential is for the designer to provide a clear framework for information that enables people to make informed and effective decisions. Use of drawings, clear tables, charts, maps, and diagrams can all be tools in sharing information (Phalen 2011; Chapter 21, this volume). In Hester’s model, Steps 9–12 incorporate ways that can address this domain.

The Design Studio as a Place for Experimentation

The design studio in the landscape architecture curriculum is often a place that allows for small experiments in the teaching of design concepts and methods for exploring design ideas. It is typically taught with a format whereby students develop design skills by working on real or imaginary projects under the guidance of the instructor. As students work on design projects, their work is critiqued by the instructor and/or guest critics and then refined. Projects can last an entire term, or class work might involve several projects, each lasting several weeks or less.

In my own teaching experience, design studios have provided fertile opportunities for combining community service with active teaching of design (Grese, 1995). Over my years of teaching landscape architecture at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment since 1986, I have had the opportunity to work with a number of community groups in Detroit and Ann Arbor where it’s been possible to have students engage community partners as part of the process of exploring design ideas. In most cases, the input from potential users provided a richer understanding of the context for the project and how the parks or gardens we designed might serve their particular needs. Students have the chance to build skills in listening to people and making them feel that their input will contribute in meaningful ways, in communicating design alternatives in understandable ways, and in synthesizing community input as part of the design process. In this way, design projects effectively become small experiments in participatory methods.

Incorporating community-based projects into design studios does have constraints. As noted earlier, most projects last only several weeks. This means that the logistics have to be carefully planned and schedules worked out with community partners. There is not a lot of time for building credibility and trust between community members and the students involved—something that can be critical in many projects.

My design studios have involved students in the first year of their design curriculum. There are both pros and cons to embedding community involvement exercises at this early stage of a student’s design training. Are the students confident and mature enough in their design skills at this stage to fully appreciate and respond to the feedback they receive from community partners? Promoting participatory processes early in students’ careers allows for the time necessary for them to develop the related mental models associated with such approaches. In addition, engaging people in the design process becomes an acceptable part of gathering input and generating design ideas rather than serving as something that is only added to special projects. Doing this helps promote a transparent process whereby young designers are more self-aware and articulate about how they can generate design ideas with and gather feedback from community members. In the next two sections I describe some of these class projects and highlight some of the opportunities they afford for the landscape architecture students as well as the participants in the projects.

Designing for Children’s Play

Many of the community engagement projects I have run in my design studios have involved working with children and the design of play spaces or gardens directed toward children, although the processes we’ve followed apply to other ages and client types. I’ve found that students are quite adept at planning activities to engage children, and children respond readily to attention by the students. In addition, before planning workshops or listening sessions with children, we have typically talked in class about characteristics of environments designed for children and shared stories of the kinds of spaces we all enjoyed in our youth. I have often used Randy Hester’s (1979) article “A Womb with a View,” which details discussions with his students, and Talbot and Frost’s (1989) article “Magical Playscapes” as a way of getting students to think about children and places special to them. The following descriptions highlight a few design studio projects engaging children as part of the design process.

Emmanuel Community Center, Detroit, Michigan (1996)

Founded in 1990 as an outreach of Emmanuel Parish and the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan, the Emmanuel Community Center provides a variety of social services and outreach to a neighborhood in Detroit and Highland Park with large numbers of Chaldean/Arab and African American residents. I learned of the center’s program through Margi Dewar, a faculty colleague in the Urban and Regional Planning Program at the University of Michigan who had previously worked with them on some urban redevelopment and planning projects. We pursued each of the three projects that the center wished for us to address by dividing the second semester design studio class into three teams. Here I’ll report only on the project involving two vacant lots that the center wanted to turn into a community-built park for teens.

The center ran two programs for teens in the community: Girl Talk and Boys to Men. Our students met several times with the teens who had already been involved in cleaning up the two vacant lots where they wanted to create their park. On the first visit, the teens gave our students a tour of the neighborhood (Figure 19.1), pointing out what they regarded as key features—homes with vicious dogs, places where the teens liked to hang out, routes they walked, etc. On the second visit, students brought model-building materials and worked with the teens in small groups to identify elements they’d like to see in the park and arrange them spatially (Figure 19.2). Key features included a space for soccer, a basketball court, an area for dancing, and a small shop area for selling snacks. They thought that the snack shop would help raise funds for the park and for activities they’d like to plan. They also wanted areas for sitting and watching the various activities as well as a high fence or other control measures for keeping out vandals. One of the teens, a sixteen-year-old female who was the oldest in the group, had helped create the neighborhood playground when she was younger and offered to serve as the “synthesizer” for the group. She took ideas generated by the other teens and combined them into a summary model. My students then took the ideas and headed back to our studios in Ann Arbor to process what we had heard and return with a set of design proposals for the teen groups.

When we returned about two weeks later with design ideas in hand, the responses by the teens provided memorable lessons in design communication. The designs that veered too far from what the consensus had been for the park were largely ignored. Stylistic graphics were also dismissed. The teens gravitated to those student drawings that showed people like themselves participating in the activities they had asked to be included in the park. Most popular of all was the design by a student who ably integrated all of the key features the teens had wanted and illustrated his design through an aerial perspective and key sections and sketches that showed a vibrant game of basketball, other teens dancing, etc. The design was simple, and the graphics were easily understood—clearly two key themes that became lessons from the project and have been shown by Phalen (Chapter 21) to be important in design communication. Another student learned a lesson about graphic representation when the teens reacted badly to the faceless, nondescript people she had included as scaled figures. Thinking quickly on her feet, she brought out colored pencils and asked the teens to “fix” the drawing. They eagerly went to work reshaping the people to look like themselves, with appropriate clothes and hair fashions, and in the process took ownership of the student’s design.

Figure 19.1. Teens from the Emmanuel Community Center provided students with a tour of their neighborhood, highlighting special places and their concerns. (Photo by R. E. Grese)

Figure 19.2. Teens take ownership of drawings done by University of Michigan students, modifying how people are shown in the drawing. (Photo by R. E. Grese)

Children’s Garden for Mott Children’s Hospital and Nichols Arboretum, Ann Arbor, Michigan (2010, 2011)

This pair of projects, conducted in consecutive years, involved students in the second semester of the landscape architecture program. It grew out of a desire to create a garden space between Nichols Arboretum and the new Mott Children’s Hospital that was being built about a block away from the entrance to the arboretum. As director of Nichols Arboretum, I wanted to encourage families and staff from the hospital to use our property as a place of respite to contrast with the pressures and stress of a hospital environment. Several key administrators and family advocates from the hospital were also interested in creating outdoor play spaces that would substitute for a rooftop playground on the old hospital that was being lost by the new hospital construction.

In the first year the studio class worked entirely with staff and volunteers at the hospital—namely doctors and nurses, family program specialists, and parents who volunteered in a family support program. We had only one opportunity to meet with hospital staff and parents, but the students heard very different opinions about what would be appropriate for the children’s garden from these two groups. While the doctors involved were committed to getting children—siblings and patients where possible—outside, they were very concerned about cleanliness and children not getting wet in fountains or water-play structures. They were insistent about safety and the limitations to strenuous activities and sun exposure that many of the children might have. The staff involved in family programs at the hospital expressed a desire for activities that would enhance existing programs in music and art therapy. The parents, in turn, offered views that gave students much greater inspiration. One parent in particular spoke about children in the hospital as having had a part of their childhood taken from them. She was particularly interested in spaces and facilities that would allow children to take physical risks, albeit limited, and regain a part of their childhood. The parents were much more interested in a variety of programming options for the site and for recognizing the needs of mobile children at the hospital who might use the garden in between treatments. Students in the class clearly took the comments from these parents to heart and created a variety of alternatives for the site that would engage individual children, their families, and staff from the hospital.[4]

For the second year we worked with children from a nearby elementary school, including grade levels ranging from first to fifth grade, as the teachers and principal saw the exercise as a valuable way of getting children to think altruistically. The schoolchildren served as surrogates for children from the hospital, imagining what they would want to experience if they were patients at the hospital or had a brother or sister staying there. This class used a different place—a gently sloping site located between the arboretum and the main entrance to the hospital. As with the Emmanuel Community Center and Broadway Park projects described above, design students were paired with the children and planned activities that they thought would engage the children—drawings of features or environments that children would like to see included, photographs of features or spaces that children could sort through and arrange on a map of the site, and abstract three-dimensional models that children created of scrap materials.

Having the opportunity to engage these children directly resulted in a much greater range of design ideas and a strong sense of empathy for children in the hospital or for their brothers or sisters. The children’s conversations during the exercises became extremely revealing. In many classes, one or more children talked about spending time themselves in the hospital or about a sibling who had spent time there. Many of the older children, in particular, thought hard about how to make key features accessible. Tree houses where they could get up high, for instance, were immensely popular, and the idea of an extensive system of ramps excited many children. Other children wanted play spaces built into the ground—caves or “hobbit” houses. Most children included trees and flowers and features that reminded them of home. The student designs that incorporated these themes were among the most successful (Figure 19.3).

Figure 19.3. Two of the drawings done by children showing features they’d like to see in a garden connecting Mott Children’s Hospital and the Nichols Arboretum. Children suggested a range of places that included large trees, climbing structures, picnic areas, and fanciful sculptures such as the giant butterfly shown here.

Working with Adult Stakeholders

Finding projects where there’s a defined adult constituency that can be done in the time frame of our studios has been more challenging than finding projects involving children. The following project, however, done with Glacier Hills Senior Living Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was an interesting exception.

Lessons from These Classroom Experiments

Each time I plan one of these participatory projects, I find that I learn something new about how to manage them as design studio exercises and how to make the experience useful for both the students in the class and our community partners. They are small experiments whereby the students and I learn about how much people like to be engaged and invited to give feedback, one of the key tenets of the RPM process. These design studio projects have become useful vehicles for students to learn firsthand how such feedback can enrich their design process.

Listening. Students learn key skills in listening to community members and in interpreting their mental models. In the projects described above, students explored a variety of techniques for hearing people’s concerns as well as their ideas for how to improve their neighborhoods or public spaces. For the project with Emmanuel Community Center, this involved taking a tour of the neighborhood with the teenagers involved with the project. In the case of Broadway Park as well as in the Mott Children’s Hospital Children’s Garden project, students were challenged to tailor maps that the children involved with the project could understand and then develop age-appropriate exercises for exploring design ideas with the children. For the community garden project with the Glacier Hills Senior Living Community, students learned skills in holding small focus groups and conducting small group brainstorming. All of these strategies for listening and recording ideas permit the students insights into the participants’ mental models (R. Kaplan, Chapter 2).

Dealing with expertise. Students also learn about the complexities that come with their role as experts in synthesizing ideas generated by listening sessions and translating them into imaginative design options. By building relationships with stakeholders early in the design process, designers can build a sense of trust that allows them freedom to advocate for ideas that might not otherwise be considered. By being involved early in the process, participants feel that their input can truly make a difference. This is especially important for groups such as children, teenagers, and elderly adults who are often not represented in many public participation efforts. In the projects discussed here, students discovered lessons about design communication and how to share their design ideas with various publics. At the same time, as the students learned the hard way in the Glacier Hills example, their expertise—that is, graphics that looked too finished—may actually make some groups feel that their input can no longer be meaningful if design decisions have already been made and thus shut down feedback. In contrast, graphic presentation techniques that show designs to be dynamic and open for continued refining may invite people to continue to be engaged. Similarly, in the teen park project with Emmanuel Community Center, students learned that inviting community members to revise or change drawings directly can help build a strong sense of involvement. These experiences help students understand that members of the public often process information differently and that design presentations can be tailored to encourage more reasoned and meaningful responses.

Fostering a sense of ownership. Finally, although these design exercises centered on the design phase of the projects, they provided strategies for beginning to transfer responsibility and ownership to community members, one of the key steps in Hester’s twelve-step process. In the teen park example, one of the girls assumed the role of synthesizer of ideas generated by other teens involved in the project. Similarly, in the Broadway Park project, the fact that the second-graders wanted to present the project designs themselves indicated a strong sense of ownership of the designs. These examples provided design students with firsthand lessons for creating meaningful roles for community members who have been involved in a community design process. Unfortunately, none of the projects described here have come to be built, allowing for the full transfer of responsibility and ownership to community members. This was not due to weaknesses in the designs or attractiveness of any of the projects but was instead due to a lack of funding or the needs of the projects being addressed in other ways.

Adaptation and feedback. Despite these positive benefits for incorporating participatory design projects in studio classes, I’ve also learned that there can be challenges. Advance planning is critical. I’ve found the need to be flexible with my course schedule to the degree that I can to adjust the scope of a project, provide time for extra meetings if necessary, or make allowance for missing resource information when that happens. I also try to get regular feedback from students to ensure that the experience remains as valuable to them as possible. Whenever feasible, I try to engage students in planning the schedule and some of the dimensions of the project so that there’s a greater ownership of the entire process.

The most rewarding feedback is when I hear from former students that these community engagement projects shaped their perspective on design and gave them skills for working with community groups. My hope throughout all of these projects is to encourage a design process that incorporates the basic tenets of RPM, inviting members of the public to be active participants in creating supportive and environmentally sound places and communities. The creative phase of generating design ideas is far too much fun for designers not to share the process with others and broaden the range of ideas that can be considered for a particular site or a community. When designers redefine their role from that of an individual artist to one of a community facilitator who uses his or her artistic skills to give expression to community values, the resulting design solutions can be ever much richer. The end result can also be beautiful, healthful spaces that are readily embraced, supported, built, and used by members of the community.

References

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